When people find out I build robots, the first question is “Do they fight each other?”

The second, almost always, is “Can you make me one that’ll get me a beer?”

This senior design project from the University of Central Florida uses an IR emitter (in the guy’s hand) and a mix of IR receivers and ultrasonic sensors to navigate the area around. Reportedly, there’s also a water gun as protection against people blocking the path. While undemonstrated in the video, you can spot the washer fluid reservoir they’re using for it.

Boston Dynamics (of BigDog fame) has the legs-in-the-real-world thing down. For reference, if you ran 28.3 miles per hour you would complete 100 meters in about 7.90 seconds. Usain Bolt’s world-record 100-meter run, admittedly from a standstill, is 9.58 seconds.

I’ll leave the stats about Santa’s annual wild ride to the other sites, but you figure an operation like that has to have some quality help back home in the shop. Wish I could get them to wrap my Christmas gifts–wrapping skills much skip a generation. Either way, Merry Christmas!

(Full disclosure: Your humble editor works for a car dealership group that includes a GM franchise.)